The two quickly moved down the street. Though a crowd was still present, it was thin enough that they had little trouble weaving through passersby.

Partway down the road, Tracey swiveled into an alleyway between two stone houses. Marian paused at the entrance and watched the little girl walk to a dead end. Upon reaching the wall, Tracey turned back around.

Marian stared at the stranger who wanted to isolate her in a dead end out of sight of any witnesses. "What're you trying to pull?" she called.

Tracey just beckoned for her.

"Probably walking into a robbery," Marian grumbled to herself as she started down the alley. "I'm going to be mugged by a child. Sandra will never let me hear the end of it."

She finally came to Tracey, impatiently waiting in front of the wall. "Okay, here I am," the witch muttered. "What are you going to show me?"

Tracey gestured at the wall.

"What about it?"

"Walk into it," she stated.

Marian gave her a bewildered look.

"At an angle," she added.

Without breaking eye contact, Marian reached up and laid her palm flat on the wall. She leaned on it to demonstrate the wall's existence and tangibility.

"No, no. Walk into it."

"If I can lean on it, walking into it isn't going to make much of a difference," Marian observed.

"You'd be surprised."

"I'm sure." She didn't budge.

Marian supposed she was being needlessly antagonistic to this little girl, but she didn't care much for her bossy tone. Besides, it was hard to take Tracey seriously when her best attempt at staring someone down was a grumpy pout.

After a while, Tracey finally instructed, "Move. I'll show you."

"Be my guest." Marian stepped back.

The little girl walked close enough that her chubby cheeks brushed against the wall, then turned at a sharp 45° angle to the left. She strode forward, sliding along the stone wall as though it were coated in slick soap. The alley wasn't very wide, so it didn't take long before she found herself in a corner where two buildings met.

"Wow. Yeah. You sure showed me. I'm really surprised. Holy Lady, I'd better go get the Wyvern Hunter right away."

"Shh."

Tracey continued to work her legs despite the presence of unmovable barriers on either side. Then, against all reason, she started moving forward, slowly easing into the walls of the buildings as though she were trying to force herself through a curtain of slime. As she moved, her body began to vibrate as though it were a single object.

"What are you-?"

Marian's question was answered when Tracey abruptly vanished into the corner.

"Tracey?!" She raced over and reached out, only for her hand to be stopped by the still tangible wall. She probed the stone masonry a few times but found no ways in. "What in the world...?"

She looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, only to find herself completely alone in the alleyway. With nobody else to use as a sounding board for theories, she had to settle for herself.

"There has to be a perfectly magical explanation for this," Marian decided. Magic had explained many impossible phenomena across Sidhegaard, after all. Magic let Marian command the very elements of the world and bend them to her will. Magic mended broken bones and inflicted terrible pestilence. Magic made electrically charged metals stick to one another and force each other apart. Surely, magic could explain someone walking through a wall.

"...but if there is a spell that lets you do that, Lady knows I've never heard of it." Marian crossed her arms. "Maybe they cover that in third or fourth year at Starry Night U?"

A bitter chuckle forced its way out of her lungs. "Nah. No way a little girl like that knows more about magic than me. Must've been some kind of trick of the light with a secret passage or something."

She felt the corner again. It was still as solid as it looked.

"...a really, really well-hidden secret passage."

She walked her way back down the wall with her hands. She stopped at the midpoint, resting there with her palms flat on the stonework. She watched for a minute as her gloved hands failed to press through the wall.

She sighed. "I suppose I'll have to try doing it myself, huh?"

Marian stepped as close as she could. She tried working her legs in a gentle stride forwards, but the wall stopped her. She spent several futile seconds straining against the wall but accomplished little besides scuffing her boots on the cobblestone and smooshing her nose.

"Oh, right. Have to be at an angle." She corrected her positioning and started again.

This time, she found herself sliding along the wall. She concentrated on her feet, observing that her strides were at an inconsistent angle with the direction she was moving. Complicated trigonometric diagrams appeared in her head as she tried to puzzle out the physics of what was happening, but the only explanation that made sense required the wall to actively repel her.

Marian reached the corner, but she never felt the stone. Instead, the walls were like invisible forces pushing against her, rapidly alternating between one another. While not painful, the sensation was unpleasant, and she felt it slowly propelling her backwards. She gave up trying to understand what was happening and concentrated on maintaining her pace towards the corner. Each stride brought her a fraction of an inch closer to where the walls intersected.

Finally, she watched as the tip of her boot sunk into the wall. A numb chill settled into her toes. The sensation went away as the invisible force pushed her boot out of the wall, but it returned when her stride brought her other boot into it.

Marian gritted her teeth and continued to wedge her way into the corner. With every step forward, more and more of her feet entered the stonework. Soon her legs and her hat started merging into the stone, and she felt the lack of sensation set in deeper the more she sank in. When her nose touched the wall, it felt less like she was pressing against cool stones and more like she was breaking the surface tension on a lake. Then her eyes passed through, and-

Suddenly, it was as though the walls were no longer there. The witch didn't realize how much she had been straining against the forces pushing against her until they ceased to exist. She was catapulted forward and fell, only to be surprised when no ground rushed up to catch her.

The world spun around as she continued to tumble end over end. Indistinct shapes and images flew through her vision. She thought she could see buildings without walls, a flotilla of clouds from below the earth, water that was not water, man and beast in a slurry of lines and shapes.

The sensations ceased to make sense as the images blurred together into abstract forms. She became aware of everything through all five senses simultaneously. She could smell numbers. Her hands could taste emotions. She could hear the sun. This paradox of sensory input left her nerve endings simultaneously ablaze with pain and frozen with numbness. Somewhere, a scream rent the sky - sky? What was the right word for this place? - around her. It took her several minutes before she realized the screaming voice was her own.

Despite everything, Marian had enough sense of self to wonder if this was what every person experienced when they went insane.

Then, suddenly, there was a profound cacophony. It was as though someone had managed to compress every sound that had ever been produced into a single instant. In the time it had taken Marian to realize it had happened, it had vanished, as had every other sensation in her body. The madness stopped, and Marian was herself again.

It took a minute or two for her to realize she was standing. Other sensations slowly started to filter back. Though she was slowly savoring her every breath, she detected no odor to the air. Despite her cloak's long sleeves, a wave of goosebumps rippled its way up her arms from the faint chill. There was a gentle hum like indistinct voices somewhere in the background. She could taste blood in her mouth; probing with her tongue, she realized she’d bitten her cheek at some point during the fall. Her eyes were closed.

Marian cautiously opened her eyes. She was in a pitch-black tunnel. A grey glow filtered in from a distance, tracing borders and cracks in the negative space. She looked behind her, but there laid nothingness. The way to go was before her.

She took a tentative step forward. When no strange sensations passed through her - just the usual impact of the ground meeting with her boot - she took another. She made her way through the tunnel in this fashion, loath to place blind faith in the ground for even a single pace. After what had happened, she wasn't sure she could trust the floor's continued existence.

Despite her fears, she came to the end of the tunnel. The exit was canvased in a concave, translucent wall. The grey light filtered through, though she could only make out indistinct forms on the opposite side.

With the caution of a little girl who'd burned her hand on an open flame, she reached out and prodded the wall with her finger. The wall rippled as though it were the surface of a tranquil pond. After seeing that no harm had come to pass, she pushed further. The wall bulged in resistance before allowing her finger to slide through. She continued to extend her arm, passing her hand, then forearm through the barrier.

She watched her silhouetted limb move through the open air beyond the grey barrier. It seemed to behave as her arm normally did. There was no strangeness to how her hand felt. Could she trust that she'd remain herself on the other side of the barrier?

Squeezing her eyes shut and steeling her nerve, Marian strode forward. There was little resistance as she pressed her way out of the tunnel and into the world beyond. After a few seconds, she allowed herself to open her eyes.

The world outside the tunnel was full of color.